Where to begin?
The newsletter I’m about to write would have been unimaginable at the time I wrote the last, just two and a half months ago. In that span,
NPR and PBS stations across the country (including Chicago’s WBEZ, for whom I work regularly) have had their federal support yanked, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been forced to shut down
the Chicago Tribune laid off approximately 10% of its newsroom and eliminated its film critic position, held for 20 years by my inestimable colleague Michael Phillips (more on that below)
and the New York Times reassigned four staff critics, including the always astute Zachary Woolfe (also more on that below)
And: Because bad things are by no means limited to threes, particularly these days, earlier this week the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism informed its partner outlets that its primary funder, the Getty Foundation, has decided to pause its support for the program. At this point, the Rubin Institute underwrites most classical music criticism published in American newspapers, with nothing to say of many online industry publications. Getty and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which houses the Rubin Institute, will meet in the coming weeks to determine its future.
The Chicago Tribune, and my work for the paper, is among those affected by this pause. I am immeasurably grateful that my Tribune editors at the paper have agreed to cover the difference for now, allowing me to continue writing at roughly the same frequency through the opening of the performing arts season. But long-term funding plans currently remain unknown. (Maybe we can get an assist from Saudi Arabia?)
And I am multiply grateful to the Rubin Institute—first, for showing me the ropes during its 2018 fellowship cohort, then for supporting my work for the Tribune for as long as it did. I am grateful to the late Stephen Rubin, who was allergic to bullshit and, like many, sniffed the tidal wave of it surging towards music criticism. Unlike many, he decided to do something about it. I hope to spend the rest of my writing life—whether that’s a matter of years, months, or weeks—trying to pay his gift forward.
Some summer stories
A few notables, rather than a complete list:
In a brutal summer, the Chicago Philharmonic’s Side-By-Side concert distilled the profound privilege it is to cover music in this city. The annual tradition unites professional and amateur musicians, most of them young people, for a free public concert in Chicago parks. I juggled my violin and my Zoom microphone as both participant musician and reporter. (WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times)
I also had a blast covering Third Coast Percussion’s first-ever Rhythm Fest, an ecstatic, daylong takeover of the Epiphany Center for the Arts to mark the group’s 20th anniversary. (Musical America; outtake pictured above)
I was looking forward to covering Ravinia’s food–music crossover edition of Breaking Barriers Festival for the Chicago Tribune with dining writer Ahmed Ali Akbar. But the day before we were supposed to meet on the festival grounds, Ahmed was laid off, along with four other newsroom colleagues. (I assumed double-duty, iffily.) Ahmed’s features—deeply reported, deeply knowledgable—are still up on his Tribune author page, and he plans to boot up a Substack, Halal American, in the coming months.
A meal better shared. Photo: me, with proper ones by Chris Sweda linked above Principal trombonist Jay Friedman and second harpist Lynne Turner both joined the Chicago Symphony in 1962. They retired this summer, obliterating orchestra tenure records on their way out. (Chicago Tribune)
Earlier this summer, the Art Institute of Chicago caught flak for what seemed to be a conspicuous, Trumpish title change of its Gustave Caillebotte show, running through Oct. 5. As with most online flareups, that wasn’t the full story—but after visiting the exhibition, I left with other reservations. (Chicago Tribune)
In 2007, conceptual artist Wafaa Bilal livestreamed himself living in a Chicago gallery for a month straight. The website presented visitors with two activities: they could message a live chat with Bilal and other users, or they could aim and fire a paintball gun at Bilal. The gun ended up going off some 65,000 times. The Museum of Contemporary Art hosts Bilal’s first retrospective in the city that most shaped his art—and it includes, of all things, a comedy show. (Chicago Tribune)
Plus, fall culture guides for the weeks ahead, in music and museums. (Chicago Tribune)
The trails aren’t happy without you
We’ve all known the cultural-criticism-as-vocation ship has been sinking, fast, for years now. Still, I wasn’t prepared to lose two captains so quickly: mentors generous with their time or reassuring words, whose prose makes me see green because I could never, who are damn good at their job and have thicker skin than any I’ve been able to grow.
One of those is Zachary Woolfe. I first met Zack a few years ago through late Chicago Sun-Times critic Andrew Patner’s social circle. I was touched immediately by how he thoughtfully doted upon those friends in Andrew’s absence, planning trips and dinners and always, always making sure to visit them in Chicago.
I have been the recipient of that thoughtfulness, too. Zack has always been quick to acknowledge a query, pitch, or compliment, despite what I can only assume is a Gatling-gun work inbox. In the lonely world of freelancing, Zack has been a true colleague—one just enough older, and a whole lot wiser, to guide across shifting ground.
Then, there’s his writing. His column on making the difficult decision to donate his childhood cello is one of my all-time favorite Times stories, in any section. (Of that instrument: “Its sound was rich and bright, with a pleasing hint of rough burr when I dug into the low strings. I liked the elegant, regular grain of the wood on the front, and the uneven idiosyncrasy of the grain on the back. There was even a birthmark, an ink smudge that had ended up under the varnish at some point.”) And I don’t know who the hell else is going to describe music like this in Zack’s absence:
“The Firebird” still valued pure sound over drama, with extremes of texture that didn’t quite spark, but “The Rite of Spring” was more of a revelation, a shivery and poised combination of perfumed silkiness and brutality, as if an Hermès scarf was being ritualistically stabbed with a machete. (“The Era of Klaus Mäkelä, Conducting Phenom, Begins in Chicago”)
In more recent months, Zack had to contend with every critic’s worst nightmare—or, at least, a persistent headache—when the head of one of the country’s most influential music organizations ignited a very public feud with him. More or less, this would have been part of the job description decades ago, when critics and arts executives locked horns in clownish, crazy ways. But these days, even at a bully pulpit like the Times, it felt like a low blow.
It didn’t help that said executive’s vision of a critic’s role in the arts ecosystem is flawed and buttressed by spurious arguments. (Alex Ross eloquently deflated them, one by one, in a New Yorker column on the subject a few weeks later.) Speaking for myself, I agreed with the vast majority of Zack’s assessments of the new works getting put on at the Met. By the same token, there are many out there that disagree with us.
That’s opinion writing, baby. It’s never been about being “right” in the eyes of posterity. It’s about diversity of thought, and using one’s perch to defend that diversity at any cost.
These are the kind of big-picture, existential conversations Michael Phillips craves. He was one of the first folks to pop into my inbox with a friendly introduction and encouragement when I started writing for the Tribune. But thanks to that out-of-nowhere 2020s influx of classical music movies—we knocked our heads together for columns on Tár and Maestro—we became not just colleagues but friends. Our schtick is meeting, once in a blue moon, for niche-ish cuisines: Serbian, Georgian, Vietnamese–Croatian fusion (yes, that’s a thing in Chicago).
He’s been a sage sounding board and observer of the industry turbulence of the past few years. Zillennial that I am, I tend to text Michael for his thoughts on a recent development, or to share a headline. But whenever I crack open a particularly slimy can of worms over iMessage, my phone invariably buzzes with a call from him to pick up the conversation for real.
I don’t know why I’m sharing that, except to co-sign that Michael doesn’t like doing anything halfway. He’s principled, funny, and a fucking breathtaking writer, as his farewell column last month—I resent even typing that phrase, “farewell column”—attested.
If you’re not in Chicago and not hip to Michael’s writing, I’d hate if you started with his last word. Just a month after October 7, Michael managed to land a jetliner on a postage stamp by writing about recent films that discussed occupied Palestine “as wide(ly) as a humane filmmaker’s eyes can open.” That column ends like this, as shatteringly true as the day he first wrote it:
Last week, The Guardian ran an interview with [Yahav] Winner’s fellow Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman. […] “I still believe there is going to be a solution here. All my life, I had this feeling that after a massive catastrophe (like Oct. 7), there would be new order here in the Middle East.” He concluded with a line that sounds very much like “Waiting for Godot” relocated to a different place and time: “We can’t go on living like this.”
Both “The Present” [directed and co-written by Farah Nabulsi] and “The Boy” [directed and written by Winner] dramatize that same declaration — complicated by the awful prospect that we probably can.
But listen, the man has range. A few years ago, I remember doubling over in Breck’s kitchen laughing uncontrollably at the sight of a Tribune A&E section on her counter: Michael’s Godzilla vs. Kong review, headlined “When Hairy Met Scaly.” (Editors usually write headlines, but this one carried such a heady eau de Michel that I finally texted him this week to ask if he did the honors. “I did! And no Pulitzer!” he wrote back.)
The review itself is, somehow, even better. The first grafs:
These guys. You just want to see them happy.
It’s hard to be so alone, and angry, caught up in an ancient Hatfield-and-McCoy grudge up on Earth’s inhospitable surface. Nothing comes easily up there, among the nattering human species, when you just want to go home to Hollow Earth, where (as Robert Frost said) they have to take you in, and you settle your differences with a jaw snap or a skull-crack. No exposition, no explanations.
Well into “Godzilla vs. Kong,” a solid roundhouse punch and the fourth film in the current run of Legendary Entertainment’s “MonsterVerse” franchise, we travel to the wondrous ecosystem at Earth’s core, where gravity goes flooey and Kong finally comes to know the green, green grass of home. It’s not exactly a lyric interlude; it’s just a minute or so of peace before it’s killing time again.
Though my heart dropped when I saw the brilliant pen behind those words had decided to take a buyout, it didn’t surprise me. Do something his heart’s not in, or light it up one more time, on the beat he loves?
Yeah. That sounds like the Michael I know.
Reading and listening and reading and listening and
Nina Metz, another brilliant Tribune colleague, wouldn’t grieve the folding of NBC’s too-close-to-home comedy The Paper, an Office spinoff.
Choice excerpt: “[In The Office], the fortunes of a paper company are never treated as high stakes because they simply aren’t… A newspaper is a different proposition. The aim of any news outlet should be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and if you value the work of newspapers — and I hope you do; you’re reading this review in one! — then the stakes are considerably higher. Which is why the central premise that animated The Office doesn’t graft so neatly onto The Paper.”
I can’t stop listening to the giddy, tangled-up pop-punk of Jeff Rosenstock—and kicking myself for having to skip his Salt Shed show tonight.
Key’mon Murrah is my countertenor of the moment—thanks, Haymarket Opera, for making me hip to him. Tribune review here.
We’re not raising kids (yet), but Mary Harrington’s spot-on New York Times column articulates my own concerns for the future of nuanced, long-form thinking anywhere, whether in classrooms or under mastheads.
Choice excerpt: “This post-literate world favors demagogues skilled at code-switching between the elite language of policy and the populist one of meme-slop. It favors oligarchs with good social media game and those with more self-assurance than integrity. It does not favor those with little money, little political power and no one to speak up for them.”
Goddayumn, does NCT U’s “The 7th Sense” music video still hold up.
Kelefa Sanneh of The New Yorker asks what happened to the big, bad critic.
Choice excerpt: “Nowadays I feel less inspired to rail against, say, the most recent Lady Gaga album. It strikes me as awkward and effortful, like someone trying to start a dance party in an empty night club, but why commit that judgment to print, when, instead, I could wait to see whether it will grow on me, as awkward-seeming albums sometimes do?”
What’s missing: Fairly obvious socioeconomic context. Any attempt to locate the acerbic critic requires locating a critic to begin with. That’s getting harder, now that it’s functionally impossible to hold that job full-time (unless you’re independently wealthy, or one of the vanishingly few staff writers left, like Sanneh—and boy, does it show in this column). In a climate where many readers don’t want to pay for journalism, artists can sic their legion of fans on a person who probably made 25¢/word on the assignment, and many journalists live paycheck to paycheck, can the critic even be all that Big and Bad anymore?
BTW: I got on my high horse about the above during a Tribune interview with John Malkovich and violinist/comedian Aleksey Igudesman in 2023: “Given the current status of the profession, even well-deserved jabs at music critics can’t help but seem angled downward, if not whiffing through clear air.”
Flawless
Heartfelt emotions, honor and respect.
All front and center.
I flowed right along with each word and giggled at unexpected truths.
Well done My Friend..
We who know... know.
Dahby